In Their Love
by Hanakage
Summary: In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the Uchiha complex, fire spirals up toward the endless, sundrenched sky. Post-Canon, manga spoilers. Hinted NarutoxSasuke.


**Title:** In Their Love  
**Rating**: T (for swearing & semi-descriptive violence)  
**Warnings**: NarutoxSasuke (not blatant, but heavily hinted). Violence. Swearing. ANGST. The style is sort of experimental; it's purposely choppy and shifts between perspectives. The chunks of text that are totally italicized are flashbacks (because what is _Naruto_ without flaskbackery?). And there are dashes LIKEWOAH. Oh! And manga **SPOILERS!** This fic is set in a **Post-Canon timeframe**.  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own _Naruto_.  
**Notes: **I was working with a deadline for this, so I somehow managed to write it in two days; this fic completely consumed my soul. I wrote it a few weeks ago, after manga chapter 410.

This started as a response to the simple prompt "Sunshine" for a July contest at NamikazeAi, a SasukexNaruto community on lj. It started out simple, but somehow turned into this... THIS apparently being my take on The End of the Series?!

And I can only ask you to try to smother whatever urge you may have to kill me after reading the first sentence.

* * *

**In Their Love**

It is sunny on the day they hold Uchiha Sasuke's funeral.

The sunlight rains down upon them—unexpected bursts of warmth that flicker and wane, seeping in through the spaces between tree branches and buildings. It caresses the faces adorning the Hokage Monument, trickles down onto Konoha below like handfuls of gold bestowed upon the impoverished—onto the backs of its citizens as they patch up their roofs and repair their windows, onto the charred, scorched wounds left in the main gate as if a feeble attempt to soothe them.

Spring has arrived. And with it, life is moving forward.

Light even leaks into the Uchiha complex—a bitter irony?—and dissipates certain shadows as they cloak the barren atmosphere. (Yet some shadows, it appears, will linger infinitely.)

In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the complex, fire spirals _upupup_ toward the endless, sundrenched sky.

The scent of smoke permeates the air; it sticks to clothes and skin and hair, invades nostrils, coats the roofs of mouths. It is the kind of smell that is in some way both oddly pleasant and sickeningly putrid; it is a scent of finality.

As she watches the swirling reds and oranges and yellows and blues of the funeral fire, Sakura feels her stomach churn. For a moment, she closes her eyes—feels both the heat radiating on the outside of her eyelids and the moisture threatening to collect behind them. When she opens them again, she looks to her right. She looks at Naruto.

With her eyes she traces the set of his jaw, the straightness of his shoulders as he stares into the flames. She wonders where the boy went, strains to imagine a goofy grin or the brazen lilt of his laughter. She cannot help but feel that _this _is truly one of the greatest casualties of the war, this loss of innocence.

Kakashi observes the funeral from a distance, little orange book nowhere in sight.

Naruto catches her look of uncertainty and gives a slight nod of encouragement. Sakura licks her lips in quiet contemplation, hesitating. She doesn't know what to say, or when to say it. He was the one who wanted to do this.

She wonders what can possibly be said to eulogize a cremation of... dreams.

"Sasuke-kun," she murmurs, the sound nearly swallowed up by the sound of crackling embers. She sighs, and inflates her lungs with a deep breath—to suffocate the choked noise that threatens to burst from her chest and rise up her throat like bile. "I… will always regret that I spent so much time in your presence and yet learned so little about you. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if…if I'd been stronger," her fists clench at her sides. Without her gloves, the feel of each callus is an affirmation of her strength—and the weakness of the girl she refuses to ever be again. "Sometimes I really wanted to give up on you," she tells the fire sadly, "and in some ways, I did. I'm sorry. But I never, never stopped believing that he—that _we_—would bring you back home. And…and we did."

A faint, fleeting smile pulls at the corners of her quivering lips, even as the tears break free and run in haphazard trails along her cheekbones. "For what it's worth, I always did love you. Now I know that it just wasn't in the way I was I meant to… and it wasn't the kind of love you needed."

Naruto resists the urge to cross the distance between them and pull her into his arms, to wipe her tears and say something stupid, anything to make her smile or laugh or smack him. But he cannot bring himself to look to look in that direction. Not yet.

The silence then envelops them, stifles them, makes it obvious his time to speak has come. There is so much to say, to be said, but the words needed to convey it seem not to exist; anything he had meant to say had left him at the sight of the fire. How to possibly explain the (bastardly) significance of _Uchiha_ _Sasuke_ in his life?

"Sasuke…" he begins, voice unnaturally soft.

Sakura watches the sunlight flitter across his face—illuminating the brightness of his hair, the radiance of his eyes—as the sun begins its descent in the sky. She wonders where the rain is—

—But life is nothing like the movies. There are no howling winds, no violent downpours, no blackened skies in the scenes of life that seem to call for such. The only storms are the ones within them.

Even so, she cannot help but think it cruel of Mother Nature that it had been sunny _that day_, too.

* * *

_The dawn brings with it a cacophony of screams and the discord of frenzied orders—the roar of fire and the roar of Tsunade's explosive rage. Frantic mothers scoop up all children they can carry, footfalls ominously thunderous upon the steps spiraling up into the mountainside. _

_A baby's wail cuts clear across the bedlam like an echo of the sentiment ricocheting in Sakura's chest as she runs to join the assembled jounin and chuunin at the gate. _

_The attackers stand in a line before them, patterned cloaks catching the morning breeze and unfurling like banners of war. There are several ornately-pierced figures, a familiar masked face, a rather… colorful trio. Slimy fingers of nausea grip her stomach as her disbelieving eyes catch sight of Sasuke—Sasuke, in that cloak—Sasuke, in the center of it all—_

_(Nonononono…)_

—_Is this the dawn to which their title refers? _

_(Nononono_no_…)_

_She watches with the rest of them as Sasuke stares straight back at Konoha, unblinking, before giving a quick, subtle nod. _

_And with that, the battle begins._

_As his teammates (the nausea twists into a knife in her gut) spring forward in every direction, Sasuke is lost amid the chaos. _

_Time blurs. Sakura no longer knows what time it is, nor has any sense of how much time has passed since the onslaught of the invasion. She knows only the green glow of chakra humming in her palms and the scent of blood, and nothing else._

_Until she hears—over the clash of kunai and explosive attacks from seemingly invincible opponents—Naruto screaming Sasuke's name in perfect anguish._

_Then she knows the sound of a heart breaking. _

_Sasuke, the masked figure, and the apparent leader of the pierced-nin are gone before any of their senses can comprehend it. Naruto wastes no time in bolting after them. _

_As more of Konoha's forces attempt to follow, the other Akatsuki members rise to prevent others from following, as if—_

_Horror claws its way up Sakura's spine. They're trying to get Naruto alone—_

_(NO!)_

_She finishes healing a chest wound on a fallen shinobi, signals to all the other medic nin that were patrolling the area, and then darts for the gate. She is nearly there when one of Sasuke's henchmen—the girl with the garishly red hair—aims a punch at her head._

_Sakura only distantly registers the sound of a wrist snapping in her palm and a pained shriek before she runs like hell after her boys. _

_She follows the trails of their chakra for what feels like an eternity, over trees and hills and fields. Faintly, she recognizes Kakashi's chakra from somewhere behind her, as well as that of a few others. She doesn't give a damn that some of those others are enemies. _

_When the chase ends, it is at the Valley of the End. _

_She has only a moment to observe Sasuke, Naruto, and the other two where they stand atop the head of the Shodai Hokage before the enemy attacks. It is a few of the pierced ones ("Pain", Kakashi tells her, as they dart across wet stone). The Pain-copies are unrelenting in their barrage; she has no choice but to stay and fight._

_Once again, Sasuke and Naruto are just out of her reach._

* * *

"You were always such a bastard," Naruto says, closing his eyes as he speaks (_if they were open, they'd rival the blaze in their intensity_). "But you were also my rival, my teammate, my best friend—"

* * *

"_Why are you doing this?!" Naruto yells—and like the water rushing down over the rocks, the sound is carried over the falls. _

_Sasuke deigns not to reply, and another Chidori crackles to life. _

_Their attacks collide, over and over again. Naruto loses himself in the fight, forgets about the other two entirely—the only people in the world are him and Sasuke. He does not want to use the Kyuubi's chakra—he loses control far too easily in Sasuke's presence—but as the battle rages, his own chakra supply dwindles. The red, menacing chakra starts to churn, builds and stokes the fire thrumming through his veins, starts to break free—_

—_and suddenly, he can't move. He thrashes from side to side, looks wildly to Sasuke—but—but—_

_The other two..! _

"_Madara, Pain…" Sasuke drawls, almost curiously._

—_The Kyuubi is howling inside of him; something else howls inside of him too, upon hearing the latter name. _Ero-sennin_—_

_He can't see what they are doing, but he knows it's not good. He feels the Kyuubi's chakra being drained away, siphoned from him bit by bit— _

"_I'm just taking what's mine, Sasuke-kun," Madara replies. _

"_Sas—!" Naruto starts to yell, but the sound is ripped out of him and replaced with a scream as blinding, nerve-melting pain surges throughout his body. He is dying, he's dead, he's… _

_(Did Gaara feel like this, too?)_

_Sasuke stands at a distance, silent and not even fully looking at him. Naruto cannot stand that impassive face, wants to punch and kick and break it. He struggles—he can't move but it doesn't matter, nothing matters anymore—he cranes his neck and screams at Sasuke—screams anything that comes to mind, everything he has ever felt about the bastard. The words start to lose their meaning to his ears—he doesn't know what he is saying anymore, if it's even words at all. He knows Sasuke probably isn't listening but he hopes he is anyway, hopes with that same irrational hope he's always wasted (no, no, never wasted; invested) on Sasuke. It doesn't matter; nothing matters. He just focuses on the feel of his vocal cords vibrating in his throat; it is the only sensation (aside from his heart slamming against his ribcage almost hard enough to break through it) still keeping him grounded as the world starts to get fuzzy around the edges and the tang of blood coats his mouth._

"_Shut. Up." Sasuke eventually hisses, and for that infinitesimal instant, Naruto can see a shade of the Sasuke he once knew. _

_He cannot resist the "Make me, bastard," that bubbles up from his throat along with the blood. _

_He blinks and Sasuke is standing right in front of him. Sunlight glints off of his raised blade, and Naruto almost finds himself with the impulse to laugh at the bitter familiarity of it all._

"_Sasuke," one of them—Madara?—calls from somewhere behind him, a warning not to get too close. _

_Sasuke lowers his blade back down to his side—slowly. Naruto stares at him as Sasuke finally meets his eyes. And all he can think about is how _broken_ Sasuke looks—like a ghost, a fragmentation—_

_He doesn't understand it, but he feels something…a new source of strength, like...a foreign chakra simmering within him..._

"_Why do keep chasing me?" Sasuke spits out. "You're an even bigger fool than I always knew you were. What do you have to show for it? Right now your precious Konoha is falling, and I will finally have vengeance for my clan. You can't stop me, Naruto. You never even had a chance." _

_"Heh," Naruto rasps, "I don't know how, but I will get out of this... I will protect Konoha and bring you back home alive. Ero-sennin and your brother didn't believe me either, but like I told them—"_

"_My…brother..?" Sasuke whispers. _

"—_it's my way of the ninja." Naruto grins, even as the pain almost turns it into a grimace. _

_The foreign chakra grows stronger—is this their doing? No, no, it's not, what is this?—and he feels it seeping through his chakra points. _

_Those redblack eyes in front of him widen, but he doesn't know why._

"_I will bring you home, Sasuke," Naruto says again, quietly, "because I promised I would. I made a promise to Sakura. I made a promise to Kakashi-sensei, and to everyone else in Konoha. Hell, I even sort of made a promise to your brother…" _

"_Itachi…" _

_"...but most of all, I think I made a promise to myself." He coughs, chest seizing violently. "But it doesn't matter who I promised, really. All that matters is that _I promised_. And I think by now you should be aware, Sasuke," Naruto's eyes are losing their brightness, his eyelids starting to feel heavy, "that I always keep my promises." Even as his eyes are starting to cloud and blood dribbles down his chin, his gaze is defiant._

_Madara is laughing, _laughing_ as his ambitions are accomplished—and atop a mountain carved in his ancient rival's likeness, no less! _

_Sasuke is as stiff and silent as death. _

_A heartbeat, two heartbeats later, and the Valley is filled with a new onslaught of screams. _

* * *

"—and someone I could never give up on, even if I tried," he smiles, but it fades almost instantly. "Because I…" his voice gives out, and the sound is swallowed up by the fire.

He sighs, and Sakura thinks it sounds like a requiem.

And so, silence falls upon the Uchiha complex once again.

"Why are you doing this?" comes the quiet, almost desperate question, from between them.

Naruto turns and looks in that direction for the first time since the onset of the funeral. "Bastard," the smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth, his eyes dancing in the firelight, "don't you understand?"

* * *

_Sasuke forgets everything when he senses—no, _sees_—his brother's chakra emanating from Naruto. _

_Until he hears Naruto mention Itachi—intertwines _Itachi_ with all his insufferable babbling about promises and nindo—_

_(In the back of his head there's an imperceptible noise—like a fine veneer cracking, or the last pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle finally clicking into place.)_

_Then he doesn't know what to feel anymore, what to think—_

_He knows only the electricity rippling through his palm as it surges forward and smashes through Madara's mask, straight into those godforsaken eyes—knows only the song of a thousand birds and the memory of his brother's fingers poking his forehead._

"_Amaterasu," he feels himself whisper, pupils _spinningspinningspinning… _and then all is dark._

_The black flames swallow up everything, even the sun. _

_He hears Naruto curse, stumble, and wrench himself from whatever hold was placed upon him. Time moves too fast, and then not fast enough. There is a flare of chakra as Naruto molds a Rasengan—the sphere is a whirling, gyrating mass of blueblackredblueblackred—_

_Another scream—_

_When the last of Amaterasu's flames flicker out, it is over. _

_Sasuke steers his eyes away from the remains. His eyes are _burning_ (from the Sharingan or the fire within them?)… In the distance, Naruto is hunched over Pain's body. Blood trails across the rocks in dark rivulets, diluted in spots by the spray of the falls. _

_Sasuke walks over to him on suddenly unsteady legs, stray shards of orange crushed into nothing under his sandals. _

_When Naruto finally looks up at him, his eyes are hollow. They hold each other's gaze for a long time, searching. _

"_I killed him for the living, not for the dead," Naruto tells him, and somehow each syllable is a plea of hope. _

_Blood runs down Sasuke's face, staining his tear ducts, and falls like crimson beads of rain upon unforgiving stone. _

* * *

"No, I _don't_ understand," Sasuke scowls, and the look with which he regards the fire is more skeptical than anything else. The sun is lounging against the horizon line, the blue sky starting to be tinged with pinks and oranges. "Why did go through all the trouble to bring me here… just to give me a 'funeral'? In case you haven't noticed, dumbass," he sneers, "I'm _alive_."

"I know you are, Sasuke," Naruto can't help smiling, "I know you are..."

Sakura watches them, and can't stop the small smile that grows on her face at the sight of Naruto's.

—In the end, they had _both_ been carried back to Konoha. (They were a little broken—as always—but to her eyes, they looked the closest to whole that they'd ever been.) The various Pain-incarnations had all fallen to Konoha shinobi, or died when Naruto killed Pain. Their mission complete, Suigetsu, Karin, and Juugo had fled without incidence. Though damaged, Konoha was far from beaten.

The strain Amaterasu had inflicted upon his eyes left Sasuke unconscious for days in the hospital. Despite the near-removal of the Kyuubi, Naruto seemed no worse for the wear—though he healed a bit more slowly than usual. The moment he regained consciousness, he had asked about Sasuke. Sakura had practically needed to bind him to the bed to keep him in it; the moment he had been cleared for release, he was in Sasuke's room.

(Sakura recalls standing in the doorway, observing Naruto watch their sleeping (ex?)teammate with a look so intense it almost made her wonder if he would punch Sasuke when he awoke, or…kiss him. She wasn't in the room when he did awaken, though, so she supposes she'll never know for sure. Perhaps it was both.)

…When the nurses finally removed the bandages from Sasuke's eyes, the first thing he saw was Naruto.

After that, the next several months of his life became a blur of imprisonment, ANBU investigations, and trials— He'd never expected that they'd let him live. He had betrayed them and launched an attack upon the village with the intent to obliterate it.

But somehow, Naruto never ceased to vouch for him. ("_Yeah, he's a stupid bastard and has done some stupid, bastardly things. But he's come back to Konoha. He did the right thing in the end, isn't that what counts? Everyone deserves a second chance.") _

And somehow, the council decided to let him live, but just barely. (Perhaps having several eye-witnesses present and attesting to the fact that he'd killed the seemingly immortal Uchiha Madara was enough to soften the blow for his other…transgressions?)

The last trial had ended a few days ago. He was sentenced to constant surveillance and home arrest—there are at least four ANBU lurking in the trees around his property right now—and barred from using chakra until further notice.

But. It is over. He is alive.

Naruto had shown up on his doorstep with Sakura (and Kakashi) a few hours ago, had tugged him off to this spot without explanation, and had proceeded to build a fire in total silence. Until he declared it to be a funeral. For Sasuke.

"…but sometimes when it seems like everything has ended, there's nothing to do but just…begin again." Naruto continues. (Though he has lived and dreamed and hoped and bled in Technicolor, he has a habit of seeing things in black and white.)

Sasuke's black, black eyes reflect the firelight. Slowly he raises them, casts them up to the heavens. The dying light of the sun leaves the sky awash in brilliant orange.

The words Naruto screamed at him (that time in the Valley, it was truly the End. Or was it the Beginning?) still ring within his head—

_("I'll follow you to the ends of the earth, Sasuke! Hell, I'll even race you there!")_

—they resonate within his ribcage, push past his lungs—

_("You're not alone, you're never alone, bastard, because I won't fucking _let_ you be alone!")_

—his chest cavity pulses with aftershocks of their reverberation—

_("I don't know why but I'll never stop chasing you, Sasuke. I can't.") _

The sky is the brightest he's ever seen it.

_("Goddamnit, you bastard, I—!")_

"Don't you see, Sasuke? The life you've always known is over; that you is dead," Naruto's eyes flicker to the fire, and then return to bore into Sasuke's. They are brighter than the fire, brighter than the sky. "Now comes the 'resting-in-peace' part, but without all the resting. Now you can finally start to _live_."

Sasuke meets his gaze, and holds it.

(From where he's perched, Kakashi dares to entertain the fleeting thought that Team 7 might not, in fact, have been a cataclysmic failure after all.)

Sakura takes a few steps back, takes in the sight of their backs as the two of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder.

They stand impossibly tall, arms at their sides. The fire burns before them (for them?).

And in the moment she catches sight of their fingers just barely brushing, she finds she can at last truly believe that hope is the strongest foundation with which to (re)build a life.

They all watch as the last of the sunlight is stolen up by the dark. They watch, and wait for dawn.

**END. (BEGINNING?)**

_Well I had a dream I stood beneath an orange sky  
Yes I had a dream I stood beneath an orange sky  
With my brother standing by  
With my brother standing by  
I said Brother, you know you know  
It's a long road we've been walking on  
Brother you know it is you know it is  
Such a long road we've been walking on_

_And I had a dream I stood beneath an orange sky  
With my sister standing by  
With my sister standing by  
I said Sister, here is what I know now  
Here is what I know now  
Goes like this.._

_In your love, my salvation lies  
In your love, my salvation lies  
In your love, my salvation lies  
In your love, in your love, in your love_

—"Orange Sky" by Alexi Murdoch

* * *

**End Notes: **This fic was orginally inspired by the above song. Since the first time I heard it, I'd always wanted to write a fic that had Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura standing together under an orange sky. Little did I know that when I finally wrote it, it would have turned into... this.

And sorry for the treachery about... you know. :D

Please review!


End file.
